Charles C.W. Cooke asks in a new National Review Online column why President Obama seems to avoid one particular group when he claims to stand up for the downtrodden.
Among those whom the president has explicitly deemed to be losing out “through no fault of their own” are illegal immigrants who were brought here as children, federal workers who were furloughed during the recent government shutdown, and “homeowners facing foreclosure.” Oddly enough, however, he has yet to mention the millions of responsible and admirable Americans who for years purchased health insurance on the individual market and who are now being thrown off their plans — through no fault of their own, of course, but by him and his central political achievement.
These are the 5 million — and counting — self-reliant types who have not merely suffered the indignity of being forcefully deprived of plans with which they were largely happy, but have also been forced to sit helplessly by while a parade of imperious, preening elites explained to them with barely concealed disdain that their choices could no longer be tolerated by the state. “I am completely happy with my plan,” Margaret Davis of California lamented last week in a widely published letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein. Perhaps you are, Margaret. But the president is not, and in modern America that is all that matters. Now, for the same catastrophic plan, Davis faces an 88 percent increase in her premiums — and less coverage. Is this “fair”?
Either way, it is now abundantly clear that this was the plan all along, and those who remained wedded to the outmoded ideal that they were well-placed to determine which products worked best for themselves and their families were regarded as but collateral damage. A second NBC investigative report, published last Friday evening to a chorus of howls, revealed beyond reasonable doubt that the White House deliberately made the rules “too stringent to allow many to keep their policies” and that, despite the fact that “the administration was warned three years ago that regulations would have exactly that effect,” the president pressed ahead anyway.